The TLDR on this summation of the COP29 UN Climate Conference is that it was another year of opportunities missed…
A ‘cop-out’ is a phrase that can be dated back to the 1800s. It means…
‘…to avoid doing something that you should or have promised to do because… you think it is too difficult’
What a perfect description of the latest talks in Baku!
I have never been enchanted by the COP process (or pretty much any UN forum) to be honest; they are just talking shops and have no teeth to get anything done.
Even when countries are acting illegally, nothing happens beyond stern words and a Paddington hard stare or two!
Every year, it seems increasingly large numbers of people travel across the world (usually by plane) to discuss global environmental issues (and get oil and gas sold to them by the host countries). Still, the talks deliver precious little.
They usually overrun (COP29 overran by around 30 hours), any agreements are usually diluted down to avoid any contentious (or ambitious) statements, they are not conducted in good faith (the wealthy country leaders rarely turn up), and the less wealthy countries are really just making up the numbers for all the say they have.
COP29 Outcomes
The latest talks have been, quite frankly, a shambles.
The tone was set from the outset when the president of Azerbaijan hailed oil and gas as “a gift from God” as he lambasted Western media and climate activists. It wasn’t a great start for talks aimed at limiting climate change, but it’s hardly surprising for a country which relies on fossil fuels for 60% of its budget and 90% of its exports!
Therein lies the problem- we are so addicted to fossil fuels for our way of life that it is very difficult for some countries to see a world without them, even if it is a better one. Perhaps then, there is a modicum of understanding for President Aliyev’s viewpoint. Still, unfortunately, it is also why we will most likely do nothing substantive on climate change until it is too late.
New Carbon Offsetting Rules
Hailed as a significant success of COP 29 and passed through without debate on day one of the conference, the new carbon offsetting rules are analogous to re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic; pointless and unlikely to deliver any meaningful results.
The rules contain several serious flaws that years of debate have failed to fix, which means that the system may essentially give countries and companies permission to keep polluting. They will just prolong the opinions that we can continue to burn our fossil fuels, do nothing substantially different, and somehow trade our way out of the climate mess we are causing.
The recommendations had been rejected at COP meetings in 2022 and 2023 because many countries viewed them as weak and lacking a scientific basis. To get around this at a meeting in October this year, the supervisory body published the recommendations as “internal standards”, meaning they simply bypassed the COP approval process.
At this year’s COP in Baku, the Azerbaijani hosts rushed through the adoption of the standards on day one, prompting claims due process had not been followed and the standards were still lacking.
Issues with Carbon Offsetting Rules
Some groups claim that the standards risk “double counting”, which means two carbon credits are issued for only one unit of emissions reduction. Further, they fail to prevent harm to communities due to lack of access to their land.
Other issues have been highlighted as well; to ‘balance out’ fossil fuel emissions, the offset carbon should remain locked away for the same amount of time that the greenhouse gases persist in the atmosphere, which can be up to a thousand years for carbon dioxide…trees and soils generally don’t store carbon for that long.
The new rules, though, don’t consider this and stipulate the time periods or minimum standards for “durable” carbon storage. In fact, in 2023, almost no carbon was absorbed by Earth’s forests or soils because the warming climate increased the intensity of drought and wildfires. Even so, governments and businesses are already over-relying on such methods to achieve their Paris and net zero commitments, and the weak new rules will only exacerbate this problem.
The Finance Package to Help Developing Countries Cope With Climate Change
The other ‘achievement’ of the talks was the pledge on the finance package to help developing countries cope with climate change they didn’t cause. A deal so bad that the host nation had to force it through.
It was a deal so bad it caused the very nations that it was meant to help to storm out of the talks and risk collapsing them altogether.
The donor countries agreed to up the finance flow to $300bn a year, a mixture of grant, loan and development bank funding…a bare fraction of the total that the summit had earlier agreed was needed (a minimum of $1.3trn and probably closer to $2trn or more).
$300bn sounds a lot, but compare that with the estimated $5-7trn in subsidies the world’s governments give to fossil fuels every year.
As I discuss during the courses I deliver, the climate crisis (and other environmental problems) will persist until the business case for saving the planet’s environment outweighs the business case for destroying it; unfortunately, it is a long, long way off at the moment.
COP29 Summing Up
And that was that for another year.
Another opportunity to do something meaningful missed, more promises not kept, more gas and oil deals made and growing frustration from those most affected by the impacts of climate change.
But, worst of all, more really bad deals dressed up as successes…Shakespeare could write a tragedy, Terry Pratchett a sardonic novel and George Orwell a bleak and depressing commentary on the state of politics (some reading list that would be!), and they still wouldn’t get close to the utter farce that the COPs are becoming.
We need positive ambition and, more importantly, urgent action if we are to cause greenhouse emissions to peak any time soon (and bear in mind that the Trump presidency is predicted to add another 4 billion tonnes of GHGs to the US emissions) and stop each and every year from being warmer than the last.
The problem we face is that the environment is not something that can be easily fixed using our trusted, money-based models. You cannot buy a new atmosphere or new ecosystems, but the problem is we like to pretend that we can!
Until we get serious about addressing the existential challenges that we all face and stop the focus being purely on money (when we are actually using vast sums of it to keep feeding the problem itself), then the progress will continue to be glacially slow (a phrase which is rapidly becoming an anachronism as we stand to lose half of those glaciers by 2100!) and keep us on track for around three degrees of warming by 2100.
